The reporter seems rather aghast about it all, but the odd (but increasingly familiar) thing about the article is that there's little discussion of the underlying reason: Egypt's population growth. The population of Egypt is now approaching 84 million, having doubled in the last third of a century. The latest UN population projection is that Egypt will hit 130 million by 2050.

Third World population growth is becoming an unmentionable in the press. There's nothing much more fundamental in human affairs than population, but we talk about it less and less.

This reflects the general anti-reductionist trend in Western thought. As the education level of the elites rise, the popularity of Occam's Razor seems to decline. Who wants to figure out the simplest way to comprehend how things basically work when it's better for your career to assert that everything's very, very complicated, and only an expert like yourself could possibly begin to grasp the complexities of it all?

63 comments:

Third World population growth is becoming an unmentionable in the press.

Funny you should say that while quoting the NYT, Steve. Third world population growth is always being openly discussed in the media. Usually in relation to attempts to slow it down through contraceptives, sex education or, more unrealistically, evangelical style abstinence programs.

In the Developing World, all trends point towards a declining population. Even in the Muslim world birth rates are falling, with only a few outliers like Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Egypt above still recording such high birth rates.

As Western immigration policy is slowly hardening, I don't see why you would be worried about this. It's not like natural resources, food and water and distributed evenly.

I don't think it's a SWPL thing. They just follow the trendsetters. I think the ones supressing a free discussion are the globalists, primarily Jews. It's too systematic for it to be a fluke. They want a powerful larger Israel to control mostly a borderless, multicultural wasteland which is the rest of the world. Anything which does not fit the meme is supressed.

According to Wikipedia, Egypt's total fertility rate has dropped from 3.17 to 2.89 over the last 5 years. For the Third World, 2.89 is pretty close to replacement rates.

And in any event, it's reasonable to expect that Egypt's fertility rate will continue to drop.

It appears that Arabs are going through pretty much the same demographic transition that Europeans have gone through over the last 50 years.

It seems to me that the real population growth is taking place just a few miles north of Egypt, among Israelis who dress like its still the middle ages.

Note that the total fertility rate in Israel is 2.75, already very close to that of Egypt, especially when you consider that the force of mortality is lower in western countries than in the third world.

And the population keeps growing for 40 or 50 years after the total fertility rate stabilizes at replacement. It's called demographic momentum and it's a very big deal when you are talking about a place that's already hideously overpopulated, like Cairo is.

Correction: As pointed out in Sabril's post, Egypt's birth rate is actually reasonably low for the third world. This, I say again, all points to population decline a generation or two after the West's begins.

Steve wrote, "it's better for your career to assert that everything's very, very complicated, and only an expert like yourself could possibly begin to grasp the complexities of it all?"

This is an excellent point. In the U.S. we are paying a very heavy "elite tax" for overcomplicated legal, medical, government, and education systems. But people are starting to drop out.

People are dropping out by "ghettoizing" themselves. They get a bill from a lawyer, they don't pay it. Medical bills? Don't pay them. They work in jobs that pay mainly in cash, don't own real estate, and make themselves judgment-proof.

I also note that the elite, expert media is dying. In ghetto world, people get their news through Facebook.

This ghettoization trend will continue and it will put a serious dent in the revenues of expert-run institutions.

Since White-Americans consume such a disproportionate amount of resources, I think a reduction in that population would be beneficial.

That wouldn't help Egyptians much since they are dependent on Euro-Americans for 90% of the wheat they consume to keep the baby-making engines stoked. We give it to them as part of our "Foreign Aid" package so they don't get up to mischief. That seems to be working well as only one of nineteen 9/11 hijackers was Egyptian, albeit he (Mo Atta) was the operational leader and one of the "pilots." The real "value added" in this wheat-for-? excercise is that Egyptians are leaving the farm in record numbers to live on the streets of Cairo.

p.s. 6 October City sounds very vibrant though not as rich in diversity as one might hope for.

"an provides another recent example of dramatic decreases in TFR. In 1989, TFR in Iran was 5.2, while in 2009, it is down to 2.0. The Iranian government has been aggressive in advocating that women have no more than three children. This has been pushed, in part, through a system of disincentives for having more than three children, including the t"

As I've written before there is a simple reason why the population explosion (the ramifications of which are more acute than in in 1968 when Ehrlich wrote his book - in fact the hispanicization of pacific USA can be wholly and solely explained by Mexico's sky-rocketting population growth in that period), is nary mentioned by the MSM. Simply put, the difference between now and 1968 is that white fertility *everywhere* is below replacement level - in fact whites are rapidly diminishing. The trendies who staff the MSM don't want to be seen as castigating the blacks and browns, who after all are the perpetual martyrs.

Sylvia, In no way is 'immigration policy in the west hardening'. In fact Britain's Labour Party (ejected from office this May, precisely due to this issue), presided over an influx of immigration unprecedented, in proportionate terms, since the first settlement of the island after the last ice age 30,000 years ago. A ridiculous number in the region of 600,000 immigrants per annum were regularly being let in. Labour tried to weasel out of it, but secret protocols distributed amongst top Labour cadres - I use that term deliberately - (ie the 'Neathergate scandal', if you care to google it), reveal that its ideal of a 'borderless Britain' was official policy.

And the population keeps growing for 40 or 50 years after the total fertility rate stabilizes at replacement. It's called demographic momentum and it's a very big deal when you are talking about a place that's already hideously overpopulated, like Cairo is.

The converse is even more horrifying - i.e. it is just about impossible to reverse the effects of sub-replacement level fertility.

Not quite five years ago, when I first started getting really scared about demography, I ran a simple back of the envelope calculation about the catastrophic effects imposed by just a few decades of China's 1-Child policy:

In particular, I calculated that if the Chicoms were to abolish 1-Child in 2020, then they would need a whopping 40 years of a 4.0 TFR, followed by 60 years of a 2.0 TFR, just so that in 2120, they would get back to the population which they had in 1980.

I.e. under even those wildly optimistic projections [there's no way in Hades that a modern nihilistic state is going to support a TFR of 2.0, much less a TFR of 4.0], it would take 140 years to reverse Deng Xiaopeng's folly.

PS: I am well aware that the Muslims in Western China are keeping the Chinese TFR artificially high [which ought to be terrifying in and of itself], but in the parts of China which matter [vis-a-vis the presence or absence of the IQ necessary to create and maintain a first world nation], the situation is worse than hopeless:

And in just the last decade, Taiwan's TFR has plummeted, from circa 1.75 to circa 1.15.

I.e. this plague is endemic to the higher-IQ regions of the Pacific Rim [encompassing the Han, the Japanese, and the Koreans], and within the lifetimes of the younger readers at iSteve, the great cultures of the Pacific Rim will have gone extinct.

Evangelicals propose abstinence plans to solve worldwide population growth? Sylvia, you aren't a college girl anymore. You cannot (a) speak gibberish and (b) throw in the word "Christian" or "evangelical" with a knowing sneer and lip curl to establish your higher IQ and superior liberal morality. I know, I know, it always worked with the Kool Kids at Kollege, but you aren't at State U anymore.

There is no worldwide evangelical population control plan. Evangelicals breed like bunny rabbits, God bless 'em. If we waited for the drab black-garbed hip lefty girls of Harvard Square to reproduce America we would go extinct.

You do realize that speaking of evangelical worldwide population control plans is as silly as speaking of Mormon population control plans, don't you?

Please tell me you understand so I don't lose all hope in coeducation.

Who cares about third world population growth? Every country in the world but a few African ones and Afghanistan lives better per person than it did 50 years ago, while population has grown. Maybe they'd live even better if they limited themselves to 1.2 children each like Europeans do, but they have a right to make a different choice.

It's funny how Steve tells the truth about old truths that have been forgotten like the reality of race and gender but has taken up false beliefs liberals abandoned decades ago like the dangers of overpopulation and the greatness of protectionism.

Anon: "Since White-Americans consume such a disproportionate amount of resources, I think a reduction in that population would be beneficial."

White Americans also PRODUCE a disproportionate amount of the world's productive value, including medical and agricultural revolutions that allow 3rd worlders to breed and feed. What do you think the world would look like without white inventions and organizations?

FYI - many resources weren't considered "resources" until Whites found uses for them. Do you think Nigerians would have ever figured out what to do with crude oil without Whites? Sub-Saharan Africa never even invented the wheel or a written language.

One reason liberals are gaga about global warming is that it is an abastaction. This abstraction can then be interperted to mean whatever the interperter wants it to mean. This helps the left avoid ever having to be critical of non-whites, wherever they may be and hence not upset their political apple cart.

Population on the other hand is easily quantifiable. The metrics are simple and no one can be confused.

Since White-Americans consume such a disproportionate amount of resources, I think a reduction in that population would be beneficial.

To this country and the whole world.

Since White-Americans also contribute a hugely disproportionate amount of charitable aid worldwide, and White-American owned and operated agricultural concerns provide a hugely disproportionate amount of food exported to developing countries, and since White-Americans comprise a hugely disproportionate percentage of progressive movements like environmentalism and feminism, I'm inclined to agree with your hypothesis. This country and the whole world will benefit from a reduction in the White-American population, and the Malthusian reduction of overall global population that would inevitably result.

Bunch of non-White-Americans (and an even larger number of non-White non-Americans) will have to die of famine and disease, though. Sucks, but whaddyagonnado?

Remember the Solow Model of Economic Growth: The higher the rate of population growth, the less saved-wealth there is investible for each new person, in terms of equipping them with the human and physical capital required to enhance their productivity. Countries can stay poor, even get poorer, even in a technologically advancing environment - if population growth and depreciation rates exceed the effects of savings and increased productivity.

China occasionally defends the preservation of their one-child policy, even well beyond the point of agricultural self-sufficiency, in terms of Solow's model.

They do this by reminding people that all the increased wealth and productivity in the world cannot expand certain limited resources (land, coast), or exhaustible ones (ore, oil).

All this used to be part of the core of the Progressive canon in the 60's and 70's, but Norman Borlaug's work reversed the Malthusian catastrophe and seemed to disprove the theory (which it did, but only for two generations).

As in Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" (1726), the King of Brobdingnag says that "... a person who could make two ears of corn grow where only one had grown before would be valuable than the whole race of politicians put together."

Exactly so. But we've now maxed out yields, so we don't have that option again.

Who wants to figure out the simplest way to comprehend how things basically work when it's better for your career to assert that everything's very, very complicated, and only an expert like yourself could possibly begin to grasp the complexities of it all?

About forty years ago when I was an Urban Planning graduate student one of the ideas floating around was the arcology. There were a number of Science Fiction novels that also incorporated this notion.

The assumption was that populations could never be stopped from growing so the solution was to build gigantic buildings the size of small mountains.

Even at the time this all seemed preposterous. We also studied the history of public housing where bigger housing project buildings were rapidly being demolished because it was discovered that high density and poor people don't mix well.

I think arcologies have about the same hope of solving our over population problems as the somewhat earlier Sci-Fi notions of interplanetary transport or colonies in orbit.

Of course there are two population problems - advanced peoples who have undergone the "demographic transition" fail to breed while those who haven't breed my rabbits.

This is the dynamic behind illegal aliens from Mexico.

You might think that too much breeding would be balanced by too little breeding and you would probably be right. But it is unlikely that this new balance will just work itself out naturally. The overpopulation of the underdeveloped world is likely to be "corrected", retuning stability to the earth.

Robert Harris, the best selling novelist, also writes non-fiction. In his book on chemical and biological warfare he predicts that the Human Genome Project will lead to the creation of a super bug to eliminate unfavored peoples. This doomsday speculation has the merit that it does not require the consent of the people in fractious democracies. A few motivated scientists could undertake a "solution" without asking permission from anyone.

It's hard to imagine that a project like this hasn't already begun or that the Pentagon doesn't have a contingency plan on how to deal with it.

Over population may not be a problem at all. I just hope those scientists in the bunker like the Irish.

Sylvia said..."In the Developing World, all trends point towards a declining population. Even in the Muslim world birth rates are falling, with only a few outliers like Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Egypt above still recording such high birth rates."

No, all trends do not point to a declining population in the Developing World.

"Most of the additional 2.3 billion people expected by2050 will be concentrated in developing countries, whosepopulation is projected to rise from 5.6 billion in 2009to 7.9 billion in 2050."

Newsflash: you cannot use the terms "population" and "birth rates" interchangeably. Well, you can--but only if you're looking to score cheap points rather than argue a point and you don't care how dumb you look.

Why don't you toddle on over to HuffPo where your particular blend of arrogance and ignorance won't do any damage?

You see this more and more in all the disasters that hit the third world. They are made much worse by overpopulation. Haiti is a recent example. Another is the flooding in Pakistan. In both cases you had way too many people living in the areas affected and the ensuing environmental decay exarcerbated the disaster when it hit. This is even true of America. Back in the 70's it didn't take long to evacuate the Florida coastline for a hurricane. Now with growth and build-up it is a huge traffic jam lasting many hours.

> Who wants to figure out the simplest way to comprehend how things basically work when it's better for your career to assert that everything's very, very complicated, and only an expert like yourself could possibly begin to grasp the complexities of it all?

That's interesting Steve - 'complicated' has been a refrain in the biomed literature for oh, a decade. One doesn't go on to say how it is complicated, it just is.

Another refrain is we should divide up these complicated diseases into sub-syndromes to aid research. Everyone says this all the time but no one ever does it or even argues for why it shoudl be done in a particular case.

Egypt needs to run a big desalinized water pumping system from the Red Sea to the Nile, roughly along the route they used for a canal 800 years ago. Everyone upstream wants to use the Nile's water before Egypt, and they are building dams, and Egypt can't stop them.

I remember a few months ago I advocated that foreign aide to developing countries should be tied to whether they develop programs to encourage negative population growth. Just thought I'd bring that up again.

"It's funny how Steve tells the truth about old truths that have been forgotten like the reality of race and gender but has taken up false beliefs liberals abandoned decades ago like the dangers of overpopulation and the greatness of protectionism.'Oooooorrrr....Steve's got it completely right and the liberals kept and abandoned exactly the wrong sets of beliefs.

A couple of points. First as Mark Steyn noted, in Turkey and Egypt and elsewhere, the moderate, educated, urban dwellers are not having kids, and the rural folk are. This is why the "Green Revolution" in Iran failed. The majority of the population was rural and Islamist, and found Ahmadinejad's actions perfectly in concert with their wishes. Turkey changed from Kemalist to Islamist, when the Kemalists stopped having kids. Israel's birth rates are below replacement for Ashkenazi/urban/secular, above for Ultra Orthodox AND ARAB.

WHO has kids creates political forces that push Islamism even harder.

Which brings me to my second point. Egypt will have to find "something" for all those rural folks moving to cities, and constant population growth. Conquest of Italy and Greece and Israel and perhaps Lebanon looks good. Those places are weakly populated, in the example of Italy and Greece filled with land and resources to be plundered, and basically defenseless. Nobody had much regard for the martial prowess of the Vandals, the Visigoths, the Franks, or the rest, but against a collapsing Roman Empire all you had to do was show up.

It's hard to imagine that a project like this hasn't already begun or that the Pentagon doesn't have a contingency plan on how to deal with it.

I've always had a hunch that the Israelis were working on such a thing to deal with the exploding Arab population around them. It would not involve killing anyone, just reducing their fertility rate. I think the South Africans were thinking of something similar before the end of Apartheid.

I agree with Anon that immigration policy is NOT NOT NOT hardening in the West. Not only has Cameron not really repudiated Labor's open borders, but France can only muster feeble deportations of a few Gypsies to Romania, where they come right back again, even that has provoked uproar inside the Government, and will be shortly forbidden by the EU. In the US, Obama's rules mandate ICE to issue backdoor Amnesty by refusing to deport all illegals, only those convicted of the most serious violent crimes.

McCain CRUSHED J.D. Hayworth in his primary, with everyone at Ground Zero of Illegal Alien influx (as Mexico collapses) voting for Juan McAmnesty Open Borders. McCain won by 30 points. [I'll bet, mostly off the female vote, which would be relatively happy for the most part for population replacement, not liking most "icky" beta White guys and figuring replacing them is just fine, and following elite opinion like a Jane Austen novel.]

Anon is quite correct on his analysis of China's fertility and the problem of dysgenic reproduction. That is why movies like "the Switch" are so important. Western (and East Asian) culture tells women to "ride the carousel" (ala Roissy) and then have ONE KID AT THE MOST with a guy they don't really desire and have at best, mild affection for. WOMEN are the key to fertility -- if they will have kids when they are most fertile, they demand a guy MUCH MUCH MUCH higher in status than they are, more dominant, more masculine, more assertive, ALL the things that modern technological societies HAVE TO CRUSH IN ORDER TO COMPETE.

You can have a society that has kids, but it will be poor. You can have a society that has a wealthy middle class, but it will not have kids.

In particular, I calculated that if the Chicoms were to abolish 1-Child in 2020, then they would need a whopping 40 years of a 4.0 TFR, followed by 60 years of a 2.0 TFR, just so that in 2120, they would get back to the population which they had in 1980.

I.e. under even those wildly optimistic projections [there's no way in Hades that a modern nihilistic state is going to support a TFR of 2.0, much less a TFR of 4.0], it would take 140 years to reverse Deng Xiaopeng's folly.

That's assuming you think China needs a population of 900 million to a billion to be successful. China's area is comparable to the USA. We're getting a little crowded with 300 million. Why would China want 3 times that amount in the same area?

Now they might run into problems with a higher percentage of older folks needing more young workers to support them. But as for the overall number, why is a billion more preferable than 300 million?

In case anyone is wondering what happened on October 6 - well, I admit I had to look it up myself, but apparently it was the date on which Egypt invaded Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Any thoughts on the significance of this? (I'm surprised we haven't had a hysterical Whiskey post already.)

Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia and Gansu contain 45% (2m sq mi) of China's land area, but only 6% (80m) of her population. I doubt this is because the 1.2 billion easterners like being crowded into the remaining 1.6m square miles just for the hell of it. We've got two coasts so we can do a lot more with our western regions than China can with hers.

I will say ONE thing for Chinese-levels of overpopulation. It's going to take them a long time to burn through their population of non-uppity slaves-in-waiting. So they have no EXCUSE for importing willing slaves, since they have a half billion (pulled from me arse) queuing up.

John McCain will be 80 in 2016, and that will probably be the end of his career. Imagine how insufferably arrogant, crazy, and awful he will be now that he doesn't have to stand reelection ever again. I think we'd be better off if the Democrat wins.

One of the things that libertarian and religious fundamentalist types who dismiss overpopulation seem to forget is that individual freedom and population growth are inversely related.

A bigger population equals more rules, more regulations, more expensive land and more angry socialists. In New Zealand our population has increased by about a third in my life time, and its not just the fishing that's got a lot worse.

If population is declining in the third world, then it's just in the nick of time, and those fast-breeding "outliers" are still a big pain in the ass.

I read the posts two years ago, too. At isteve, rah-rah -ing for McCain did not happen. At most, some were debating whether "worse is better" (the polarization that Obama would cause might make taboo subjects suddenly discuss-able) or not.

I read the posts two years ago, too. At isteve, rah-rah -ing for McCain did not happen. At most, some were debating whether "worse is better" (the polarization that Obama would cause might make taboo subjects suddenly discuss-able) or not."

Yeah, the only one really beating the bushes for McCain was Whiskey. A few others put in a good word here or there. The attitude of many (probably most) people who posted here then was: It doesn't matter who wins - we're screwed."

Wait a minute. I thought AIDS was going to depopulate the Third World and simultaneously break out into the mainstream any time now? You mean this world plague caused by homophobia hasn't even kept populations from INcreasing? Darn, another CIA plot to keep the peasants from taking over the world defeated by reality.

I think population alarmism is misplaced for anywhere with a low population of blacks. If you look at where population growth is slowing down (almost everywhere) and where it isn't (where there are blacks) it's obvious where the demographic problems of the 21st century will be.

Blacks are more fertile than other people; I suspect it's only through the efforts of Planned Parenthood that blacks are only slowly outbreeding us in America. In Africa, it's just a question of when we will stop deciding to feed them (or when they will finally produce a plague that wipes out most of the continent - and possibly a lot of us, for that matter).

Interesting article. If you interested and got time, I'd be curious to hear any feedback you may have on an Amicus Curiae I filed with the SA Constitutional Court.

Basically the Amicus alleges that SA's Truth and Reconciliation Social Contract (TRC Act) is a fraud, because it violated its mandate to make an enquiry into the origins of Apartheid. The origins of apartheid of course were Afrikaners fears about the 'swart gevaar' (black peril), the massive breeding practices, and that the demographic future of Afrikaners needed to be protected, so they could rule themselves and maintain their culture.

Anyway, so its alleges the TRC's conclusion about Apartheid having been a crime against humanity, to have been a falsification of history.

IV: TRC FRAUD: ‘CRIME OF APARTHEID’ FALSIFICATION OF HISTORY A. Negligent or Intentional Avoidance of Key Concept Definitions? B. Amnesty Meaning Changed without Due Process? C. Was Truth and Reconciliation Seen to be Done? D. Did ‘Evil Apartheid’ raise Black living standards to Highest in Africa? E. Apartheid: Crime Against Humanity; or Just War for Demographic Survival? F. Nature & Causes of Apartheid: A Just War for Demographic Survival? G. Farm Murders: A Rainbow TRC Peace, or Racial Hatred War Reality?

Its available in PDF at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/36406824/

It has been massively censored by SA media, even though there are some serious allegations about how the media cover up population issues as causal factors for many of the stories they write about. Dr. T. Michael Maher, the author of the study: How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population Environment Connection (PDF), has filed an expert witness statement of written consent on behalf of the Amicus (PDF).

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